Refrigerated display cabinets are commonplace in point-of-sale merchandising for many products. Perishable foodstuffs such as meat and dairy products must be refrigerated to avoid spoilage or thawing, and various other food products such as candy and packaged beverages frequently are refrigerated by the retailer to maintain freshness or to chill the products for immediate consumption by the purchaser. In either application, the refrigerated display case for many retail applications has evolved into an attractive self-service merchandising fixture, in addition to its functional purpose of keeping foodstuffs chilled or frozen.
Refrigerated display cabinets of the prior art generally are large and correspondingly expensive. Such refrigerated display cabinets typically are intended for permanent installation as part of the merchandising display in a store, and usually require compressors or other refrigerating equipment external to the refrigerated cabinet itself. Even free-standing refrigerator or freezer cabinets tend to be relatively large, immobile, and costly to acquire and operate, inasmuch as these cabinets generally are intended for fixed installation in relatively large-scale merchandising operations such as supermarkets or the like. Such prior-art refrigerated cabinets, while appropriate for their intended applications, simply are too expensive for many smaller or low-volume sales outlets. Merchants in areas of sparse population or limited-income consumers are concerned with reducing their operating costs, and frequently cannot justify either the acquisition expense or the ongoing operating costs of the contemporary refrigerated cabinet. Moreover, such refrigerated cabinets seldom are light and small enough to be carried and moved by one person of average strength, and thus are not truly portable.